Feast commemorates Nat Fuller: A slave, a star chef, a herald of unity

We tried, on an April night in one of Charleston’s most famous restaurants, to grasp the vision of a man known to few.

Nat Fuller, born a slave, remained one even as he became one of Charleston’s most noted chefs and restaurateurs of the mid-19^th century.

And just weeks after becoming a free man, as the city fell to the Union army in the spring of 1865, Fuller called together a group of diners, black and white, to eat a feast of his making, in his restaurant, as his guests.

It was unprecedented, says historian David Shields.

“It’s the first time an African-American has hosted (this kind of) mixed-race conversation,” he says. “Here’s a man who realizes that because of the abolition of slavery ... there’s going to be a new ground of social relationships.

“He wants to present how that conversation will go. He’s going to be the host.”

Shields, a professor at the University of South Carolina, put together Fuller’s remarkable story amid researching other historically significant chefs and restaurateurs (his book on them is slated for 2016). It led him to chair the Nat Fuller Feast, an attempt to re-create the 1865 meal, as part of Charleston’s Civil War sesquicentennial.

Chef Kevin Mitchell, of the Culinary Institute of Charleston, served as host, and he and Gullah-Geechee specialist chef B.J. Dennis and nationally noted chef Sean Brock (of McCrady’s and Husk), along with an army of others, prepared the food. Artist Jonathan Green created a vivid portrait to preside over the meal.

Some 80 historians and scholars, faith leaders and culinarians, writers and artists of many hues, were invited to McCrady’s Long Room to eat dishes as they were made in Fuller’s time, and to dwell upon Fuller’s feat.

Was that meal in the spring of 1865 a gesture of hope? A business decision? A moral realization? All of the above?

“Christian, I think,” says Shields. “You know: ‘There will be more and different faces at the Lord’s banquet than you expected.’ ”

Fuller was the son of a white planter, Shields’ research tells us, though we don’t know which: Three Fullers had plantations west of the city, where he grew up. He was likely sold several times before 20-year-old William Gatewood from Norfolk bought him, at age 15, at public auction.

Gatewood had Fuller trained as a cook, and appears to have apprenticed him to stellar caterer Eliza Seymour Lee, a free black woman (whose great-great-granddaughter attended the 2015 Feast). There, he learned breadmaking, how to cook meats and create sauces, and showed a gift for butchering game, boning birds and creating “display food” – sculpted nougat and meringues and glacé fruit depicting, for example, a train crossing the bridge to Charleston, which he made for an 1857 banquet.

A surprising number of his bills of fare survives. These tell us, among other things, he liked cooking veal more than his peers, preferred frying or poaching fish to broiling it, and used walnut and mushroom “catsups” routinely.

By the 1850s, still enslaved, he was catering and selling game imported from New York (canvasback ducks, turkeys, grouse), with part of the money going to Gatewood. In 1860, Fuller opened a “high end eating house,” arranged by Gatewood.

The Bachelor’s Retreat reigned as “the one great restaurant outside a hotel in the city,” says Shields, until Fuller’s death in 1866. “The absolute lynchpin here is his virtuosity.”

150 years, bridged

Fuller’s 1865 feast combined his unusually complete training, his imagination as a businessman and foodstuffs only someone as well-connected as he could have procured at a time when the rest of the city was reduced to daily rice rations.

The 2015 version began with a cocktail reception in the Church Street building that once housed The Bachelor’s Retreat, now a gallery. We sipped gin with bitters and brandy smashes of Fuller’s design, and listened as re-enactors of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, one of the first African-American regiments in the war, sang soldiers’ songs.

That regiment then led a procession to McCrady’s, where diners sat at two long, ornately appointed tables and worked through course after course: Creamy oyster soup, sharp Bradford watermelon pickles (a heritage melon, only now reappearing), tiny shrimp pies concealing a bite within their buttery pastry, fried whiting of perfect crunch, aged duck with oranges, venison and lamb and beef on one plate, with individual sauces, poured individually. Relentlessly buttery potato puree. Finally, dessert plates arrived, splayed with Charlotte russe, punch cake and more, with ice creams flavored with vanilla and with pineapple.

Shields invited anyone so moved to speak at meal’s end, and ferried a microphone to each in turn.

A poem was read, toasts were offered. A few people’s words touched on a more contemporary pain: Just two weeks earlier, a white North Charleston police officer had shot and killed Walter Scott, a black man stopped for a nonworking brake light.

Charleston historian Damon Fordham toasted to “us coming together,” as people nodded and murmured softly. “It was needed 150 years ago, and still needed today.”

The Feast took place April 19, the day in Baltimore that Freddie Gray died.

This story was originally published May 5, 2015 at 2:37 PM with the headline "Feast commemorates Nat Fuller: A slave, a star chef, a herald of unity."